Sam Biddle

Jonny Ive is about to kick someone's ass: eminent French design homme Philippe Starck just said he's behind an amazing Apple mystery gadget. And it's coming out in eight months. One problem: Starck's stuff is sometimes very ugly!

Starck was predictably demure in his interview with a French radio program, declining to give any further detail than this: "Indeed, there is a big project together which will be out in eight months." So, of course, speculate away about this being The Apple HDTV Steve Jobs dreamt of before he died. Or it could be pretty much anything else.

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What doesn't require speculation is that Starck's design history is pretty much the exact opposite of Apple's: curvy, often transparent blobs that look like alien funguses instead of clean, modern, human-tools. Just look above and below. They're modern, sure—but it in a George Jetson way. Almost everything Starck designs looks like it emerged from a vision of the future as conjured by a 1960s housewife—a total departure from the (sorry) stark classics of Apple design kingpin Jonny Ive.

Starck also revealed that he'd been visiting Steve Jobs once a month for the past seven years, and still maintains a friendship with his wife. So it's safe to say that whatever Apple TV mystery object he's crafting has Jobs pre-mortem blessing, if not direct input. Which is bizarre, given that most of the things Starck's design would make Jobs collapse on the ground vomiting from aesthetic objection.

Is this a new direction for Apple, taking design cues from a dude who sells alarm clocks at target?

Do you want the man who designed this human rights violation of a lamp to be behind your next iAnything?

Reached for comment, an Apple spokeswoman said the company is not working on a new product with Starck and declined to speculate about what the designer might have been referring to when he told France Info Radio that he and Apple "have a big project together that will be out in eight months."

Well, either Apple is lying or Starck is lying. Someone is lying. Someone is lying.